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The study of internal crisis

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Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen

Purpose Previous crisis communication research has primarily examined the external dimensionof crisis communication, i.e. the crisis response strategies applied by organizations to protect and/orrestore their image or reputation among external stakeholders in a crisis situation. The purpose of thispaper is to set up an integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication in privateand public organizations.Design/methodology/approach The paper takes a theoretical approach reviewing the literatureon crisis management and crisis communication and discussing the concept of internal stakeholderand the implications of a staged approach.Findings An integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication is developedbased on two assumptions: first, that internal crisis communication research must start with a detailedstudy of the relationship between an organization and its internal stakeholders (in this case: theemployees) to clarify to what extent internal crisis communication differs from external crisiscommunication; and second, that internal crisis communication research can best be systematizedapplying a staged approach (precrisis stage, crisis event, postcrisis stage) as an heuristic method.Originality/value Apart from a few exceptions, the internal dimension of crises, crisismanagement, and crisis communication has, by and large, been unexplored.Keywords Corporate communications, Employees communications, Employees relations,Crisis communication, Integrative framework, Internal communication, Internal stakeholderPaper type Research paper

IntroductionCan and shall an organization that finds itself in a crisis situation communicate with itsinternal stakeholders in the same way it communicates with its external stakeholders?And if the answer is no, what then distinguishes internal crisis communication fromexternal crisis communication? These are the two questions that we would like toaddress in this conceptual paper.Over the last ten to 15 years, crisis communication has established itself as a newacademic discipline cherishing ambitions to become an autonomous research area of itsown. Initiatives have been taken to organize topic-specific international conferences oncrisis communication (such as the new series of conferences about CrisisCommunication at the Beginning of the 21st Century, which started in October 2009at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany). Initiatives have also been taken tocreate new topic-specific international research networks (such as the new ECREATemporary Working Group on Crisis Communication established in 2011). Or as thetwo editors of the newly published and voluminous Handbook of CrisisCommunication, Coombs and Holladay (2010, p. xxvi), rightly state:The authors have equally contributed to this paper.

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Currently, crisis communication is more of a subdiscipline in public relations and corporate

communication. However, as the research in crisis communication continues to grow, it maybe able to establish itself as an independent field that is both provocative and exciting.

So far, crisis communication researchers have primarily focused on the external

dimension of crisis communication, and in particular on the crisis response strategiesapplied by organizations in crisis, in their communication with external stakeholders(such as customers, media, politicians, and NGOs), to protect or restore an image orreputation that has been threatened or damaged by the crisis. It is now time to startfocusing on the internal dimension of crisis communication, an area clearly sufferingfrom being under-researched. The already mentioned Handbook of CrisisCommunication has a complete section devoted to future research directions,outlining new areas and approaches that will bring crisis communication a step further(such as emotions, learning, global crisis, the cultural aspects of crises). However, onlyone of the seven chapters contained in this section draws our attention to internal crisiscommunication (with a strong focus on the precrisis stage) as a new and relevantresearch area within the field. Taylor (2010, p. 703) writes:The future of crisis communication research is in studying and understanding the internaldynamics of organizations. The future for crisis communication researchers and practitionersis in answering the how and why. [. . .] Communication and relationships are at the centerof this internal communication approach to crisis communication.

So how then do we start studying internal crisis communication? The aim of this articleis to set up a new integrative framework for research in internal crisis communication;a framework which, on one hand, identifies and highlights how internal crisiscommunication differs from external crisis communication, and which on the otherhand, imposes structure on and delivers an overview of the individual sub-areas withininternal crisis communication. The article takes its starting point in the following twobasic assumptions:(1) That research in internal crisis communication must start with a detailed studyof the relationship between an organization and its internal stakeholders (in ourcase: the employees) in order to discover what characterizes internal crisiscommunication.(2) That research in internal crisis communication can best be systematizedapplying a staged approach to crisis management where there is a distinctionbetween at least three stages: a precrisis stage, the crisis event, and a postcrisisstage. Although the staged approach recently has been subject to criticism fromvarious scholars, it may serve as a kind of heuristic method allowing us tocreate a preliminary overview.Literature reviewWe have divided the literature review into two parts:(1) The practical-oriented literature, which is mainly based on personal experience.(2) The theoretical-oriented literature, which is based on the scientific andsystematic study of crises, crisis management and crisis communication(including neighboring academic disciplines such as organizational behaviorand organizational communication).

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The practical-oriented literature

If you google internal crisis communication, you get more than 12,000 hits. Many ofthe web sites or documents referred to in these hits have been authored by publicrelations or communication consultants or consultancies. A typical representative ofthe practical-oriented approach is C4CS or center for communication strategies (www.c4cs.com), based in Pittsburgh in the USA, which has specialized in strategiccommunication and crisis management, including communication with both externaland internal stakeholders. Oliver Schmidt, managing partner of C4CS, is the author ofseveral articles about effective employee communication in times of crisis. Twoelements seem to be recurrent in these articles:(1) A communication plan for internal crisis communication comprising a series ofrather traditional questions that you will find in almost every communicationplan:1. What is the desired outcome of the communication? [Objective]. 2. What will becommunicated? [Message]. 3. Who will initiate the communication? [Sender]. 4. Whichgroup of employees (and management) will be communicated with? [Recipient]. 5.How and/or where is the communication going to happen? [Channel/venue]. 6. Whenwill the communication take place? [Timeline] (Schmidt, 2005, 2010).

(2) A series of more topic-specific normative advices concerning internal crisis

communication, from which you can make up an idea, but mostly indirectly,about what characterizes internal crisis communication. A few examples:It is necessary to increase the internal communication frequency since employeesusually have a high demand for updated information as well as the desire to providecontinuous feedback. [. . .] When ever possible internal communication should precedeexternal communication. Engaging in an honest dialogue with as many employees aspossible also fosters better understanding and employee support [. . .]. The internalcrisis communication should be conducted using established communication channelsand venues in addition to those that may have been developed to manage specificcrisis scenarios. [. . .] face-to-face communication between supervisors and their directsubordinates remains a decisive tool in facilitating effective employee communicationduring a crisis [. . .] (Schmidt, 2005, 2010).

It is characteristic of the practical-oriented literature on internal crisis communication

that it is very sender-oriented (a focus on how managers must communicate withemployees in a crisis situation), and that it consists of normative advices based onpersonal experience from working with crisis management and crisis communication(consulting) in organizations. Usually, there are no efforts made to describe or explainthe differentia specifica of internal crisis communication.The theoretical-oriented literatureAlthough factors of relevance for the study of internal crisis communication aretouched upon now and then in the academic literature on crisis management and crisiscommunication, this sort of research is seldom thematized as research on internal crisiscommunication. Key examples of such factors are: decision-making in a crisis situation,crisis perception, psychological defense mechanisms, organizational learning, and theimpact of organizational culture or the personalities of organizations on theorganizations ability to handle a crisis. When internal crisis management and crisis

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communication are finally thematized, only very short chapters or sections of a book ora journal article are devoted to the topic. A good example of this is Fearn-Banks (1996)excellence theory of crisis public relations, where there is a short section onCommunicating with Internal Publics containing a set of normative advices abouthow to communicate with what the author terms a functional public before andduring an organizational crisis.Ian I. Mitroff, the founding father of modern crisis management, has in several of hisarticles and books examined aspects, especially psychological ones, that are relevant tothe study of internal crisis communication. In Pauchant and Mitroff (1992), theexistential nature of organizational crises (including individual defense mechanism) isstudied applying the onion model of crisis management. In his more recent publications,Mitroff has studied the emotional crisis-preparedness of organizations focusing on adetailed analysis of defense mechanisms such as denial, disavowal, idealization,grandiosity, projection, intellectualization, and compartmentalization. According toMitroff (2005, pp. 39-42), another characteristic of organizational crises is that they areexperienced as major acts of betrayal because people need to have someone to blame forthe crisis. The leaders or managers who were supposed to take care of the members ofthe organization are thus often viewed as betrayers and are demonized.So far, Karl E. Weicks theory of retrospective sensemaking (Weick, 1979, 1995, 2001,2009), focusing especially on situations where organizational sensemaking breaksdown, typically in a change or crisis situation where demands on sensemaking can besevere, has been the most important and comprehensive contribution to the study oforganization internal dimension of crises, crisis management and crisis communication.Weicks (1988) study of the Bhopal disaster, later updated in Weick (2010), and Weicks(1993) study of the Mann Gulch fire are often regarded as paradigmatic exemplars ofhow to conduct a sensemaking study, and the starting gun for a stream of researchlabelled crisis sensemaking. In the first article, Weick (1988, p. 305) investigates howaction that is instrumental to understanding the crisis often intensifies the crisis(the theory of enactment and enacted environments), and how commitment, capacity,and expectations have an impact on sensemaking in crisis situations. In the secondarticle, Weick (1993, p. 105) defines crises as cosmology episodes:A cosmology episode occurs when people suddenly and deeply feel that the universe is nolonger a rational, orderly system. What makes such an episode so shattering is that both thesense of what is occurring and the means to rebuild that sense collapse together.

The studies conducted within the field of crisis sensemaking are first and foremostcharacterized by qualitative casestudies with the purpose of examining:.how organizational members create meaning at an organizational micro-levelas a crisis unfolds in various contexts (Weick, 1990, 1993, 2010; Wicks, 2002;Weick and Sutcliffe, 2003; Kayes, 2004); or.how sensemaking takes place at a societal macro-level at the end of a crisisthrough the study of reports and other documents from public inquiries (Gephart,1993, 2007; Brown, 2000) (for an overview of crisis sensemaking research,see Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010).Recently, Weick and Sutcliffe (2001, 2007) have contributed to the ongoing debate aboutanticipation versus resilience the formal crisis-preparedness (crisis management plan,

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crisis management team) etablished before a crisis breaks out (precrisis stage) versusthe ability of organizational members to bounce back after the crisis has broken out(crisis stage or postcrisis stage) with their study of collective mindfulness inhigh-reliability organizations.To these examples from the Anglo-Saxon literature on crisis management and crisiscommunication, one may add articles and books published in other languages thanEnglish, such as Ogrizek and Guillery (1997), Bertram (2007) and Mazzei (2009).It is characteristic of the theoretical-oriented literature on internal crisiscommunication that it is very sparse and that it focuses more on psychological than oncommunicative aspects, although it can be difficult to keep these two perspectives apart.An integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communicationIn this section, we attempt to set up a new integrative framework for the study ofinternal crisis communication. The framework is based on and is a result of two basicassumptions:(1) That internal crisis communication research must start with a detailed study ofthe relationship between an organization and its internal stakeholders (in ourcase: the employees) to clarify to what extent internal crisis communicationdiffers from external crisis communication.(2) That internal crisis communication research can best be systematized applyinga staged approach (precrisis stage, crisis event, postcrisis stage) as a heuristicmethod.First basic assumption: the relationship between an organization and its internalstakeholdersStakeholder management is a research field that has witnessed important changes sincethe publication of Edward Freemans seminal book Strategic Management: A StakeholderApproach (1984) (Friedman and Miles, 2006; Laplume et al., 2008; Parmar et al., 2010). Thefield has moved from a one-sided stakeholder management approach to a two-sided ormulti-sided stakeholder relations management approach (Andriof et al., 2002, 2003).Where stakeholders were considered to be rather static actors having fixed stakes,stakeholders are now viewed as dynamic actors having variable stakes that changeover time, and trying to adapt their stakes through different forms of cooperation(Freeman et al.s (2010) distinction between a fixed stakes model and a joint stakesmodel). In this way, the relations between an organization and its stakeholders becomefar more complex and dynamic.An organizational crisis may put these complex and dynamic relations underpressure. Especially, three kinds of elements make stakeholders become more dynamicand volatile. First, stakeholders may change stakeholder type influencing their degreeof salience because of a crisis situation. Second, stakeholders often have different rolesand are part of different social networks at one and the same time. Third, a specificstakeholder group rarely forms a homogenous group of people. In the following, theseelements will be developed further.Mitchell et al. (1997) distinguish between different types of stakeholders (dormant,discretionary, demanding, dominant, dangerous, dependent, definitive stakeholder, andnon-stakeholder), and point out three dimensions in their stakeholder salience model thatare important for the salience of the individual stakeholder in relation to the perceptionthat an organization or its management holds of this specific stakeholder, namely power,

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legitimacy, and urgency. Based on this model, Alpaslan et al. (2009) describe how a seriesof stakeholder dimensions can change status in connection with a crisis, and howstakeholders can develop from being dormant, discretionary, and demandingstakeholders to becoming dangerous, dependent, and definitive stakeholders.What characterizes employees as a stakeholder group?[1] It can be difficult or evenartificial to think of the employees of an organization as a purely internal stakeholder,in so far that an employee may have other roles and belong to other stakeholder groupsinternally or externally (for instance as a shareholder, a customer, a citizen, a consumerof news, or a member of an NGO). It is also important to emphasize that a stakeholdergroup is not a homogenous group of people. Customers as a stakeholder may bedivided into a long series of various subcategories or stakeholder groups with differentstakes in the organization itself or in its products. This also applies to employees. Theyform a heterogeneous stakeholder group that typically consists of different groups ofemployees having different tasks, functions, and interests within the organization,such as workers, administrators, top managers, middle managers, project teammembers, and board members. Employees also participate in various kinds of socialnetworks inside and outside their workplace.However, there is a series of elements common to these different groups of employeesthat at least to a certain extent make them differ from other kinds of stakeholders:(1) the type of relationship;(2) the stakes;(3) the identity and the degree of identification with the organization; and(4) the role of the employees as both senders and receivers of internal (crisis)communication.These four elements have consequences for how you can or should communicate in theorganizational everyday life as well as in crisis situations:(1) What characterizes the relationship between an organization and its employees?Employees have a different kind of relation to an organization, which, to a certainextent, differs from the relationship between the organization and its externalstakeholders. According to various stakeholder typologies, this relationship turnsthe employees into a contractual stakeholder having a legal relationship with theorganization, often materialized in the form of an employment contract (Charkham,1992). Employees have an employment relationship in the form of an economicrelation where a wage and salary earner is compensated for his work and use oftime, as well as a formal relation due to a specific distribution of roles, tasks, andfunctions that may reflect the power structure of the organization. Some externalstakeholders such as customers may also be described as contractual stakeholders,but their contract with the organization is of quite different kind (delivery of aproduct living up to certain promises and expectations).The relations between the organization and the employees have an influence onthe way employees act, what they are allowed to do and to say in the everydayorganizational life as well as before, during, and after an organizational crisis.(2) What are the stakes of the employees? As mentioned above, employees can besaid to have stakes that to a certain extent differ from the ones of the externalstakeholders. Attempts have been made to describe some of these stakes by

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means of expressions such as salary, job security, working hours and workingconditions, degree of freedom and autonomy versus control, and motivation andengagement. These stakes may vary from group to group depending on age, sex,seniority, educational background, human type, private life, organizationalfunctions, and positions.These stakes affect the perceptions the employees have of their ownorganization, as well as they play a role for their ways of interpreting andunderstanding the behavior and the communication of the organization.Furthermore, their stakes also have an influence on the attributions, i.e. thespontaneous causal explanations that employees are making in relation to acrisis situation, which are important for instance for the ascribing of crisisresponsibility to their own organization or to management (Coombs, 2007a).(3) Employees have another kind of organizational identification andorganizational identity that make them differ from external stakeholders, atleast to a certain extent. They typically feel another sense of belonging andcommitment to their job and to their workplace unlike an external stakeholderwho may have other kinds of interests in an organization. Research within thefield of organizational identity (Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Pratt, 1998) haveshown that the organizational membership of employees seem to constitute anintegrated part of the personal identity and that this can explain the immediatesense of obligation to defend the organization from outside attacks, includingattacks on the image and reputation of an organization.This kind of identification and identity influences for instance the attitudesand emotions, the self-esteem, and the degree of belonging and havingownership. To give an example: if the feeling of pride is negatively influencedby a crisis (and the negative media coverage derived from it), it may result in therejection of the role as positive ambassadors and in employees trying todistance themselves from their organizational identity (Aggerholm, 2009).(4) Employees can be mobilized in crisis communication, not only as receivers butalso as senders, just as they in the roles of internal or external stakeholders canact proactively in a crisis situation, within a rhetorical arena where theirvoices meet and compete, collaborate or negotiate with other corporate andnon-corporate voices (Johansen and Frandsen, 2007; Frandsen and Johansen,2010b). Not only do they in a crisis situation talk about their feelings andattitudes towards their workplace with their colleagues, families, and friends,some of them also give interviews or statements to the press as well as theychoose to express their own opinion for instance through the new social media.Whether they act as negative or positive ambassadors can be very important toan organization in a crisis situation (www.glassdoor.com).To sum up, we can conclude that employees as internal stakeholders have a strongerand more complex psychological dimension than most of the other stakeholders(except perhaps investors who also form a kind of internal stakeholder group).Employees are closer to the organization. This psychological dimension is oftencharacterized by specific emotional and cognitive reactions and feelings in a crisissituation such as the feeling of insecurity and uncertainty (what is going to happen?),chaos (the breakdown of the whole well-known and orderly universe), stress

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(as a consequence of an enormous pressure of work and time, or lack of knowledge,

information or competences or, worst of all, lack of meaning), the feeling of betrayal(by management or by colleagues), fear (of loosing job, status, position, esteem, andgood social networks), grief (physical and psychological losses like the loss ofclose colleagues (during layoffs) or external lives (because of accidents), and anger(towards the responsible persons or the ones believed to be responsible)).If you compare employees with customers as stakeholders, the former must dealwith a workplace and the work that they are performing and upon which they buildtheir life, while the latter must deal with a product that they have acquired (throughpurchase) and that they are supposed to consume.Second basic assumption: the staged approach as a heuristic methodOne of the things that characterizes the development within the field of crisismanagement and crisis communication, especially after the publication of Steven Finksbook Crisis Management (1986), is the move away from a tactical, reactive, andevent-oriented perspective towards a more strategic, proactive, or interactive andprocess-oriented perspective (Frandsen and Johansen, 2010a, pp. 307-8; Roux-Dufort,2000a, pp. 17-18, 2000b, pp. 17-29). The latter is characterized by a staged approachthat is based on a distinction between a certain number of macro and micro stages(Coombs, 2007b, pp. 14-20; Johansen and Frandsen, 2007, pp. 133-42).This staged approach has recently been criticized for having:.a linear and sequential idea of the life cycle of a crisis, where something startsand ends at specific points in time;.an idea according to which it is always possible to discern three stages: a beforethe crisis stage, a during the crisis stage, and an after the crisis stage,without overlaps or grey areas; and.an idea according to which organizations only confront one organizational crisisat the time.In short: the staged approach is accused of having a too simplified, or even misleading,representation of the social reality called crisis (Jaques, 2007).We agree to a large extent with these objections claiming that it is about time thatwe replace the simple process-oriented perspective (Jaques, 2007) with a complexprocess-oriented perspective within crisis management and crisis communication(Frandsen and Johansen, 2010c). However, this does not mean that the staged approachis of no theoretical or practical value. Thus, we maintain that it is possible to apply athree-stage model as a heuristic method, that is: as an ad hoc procedure allowing us tostudy a specific field (in our case: internal crisis communication).As it appears from Figure 1, we distinguish between three stages on the horizontal axis:a precrisis stage, the crisis event, and a postcrisis stage. Each stage is defined by a focalpoint within internal crisis management. In the precrisis stage, there is a focus onpreventing and preparing. During the crisis event, there is a focus on handling the crisisand sense making. And in the postcrisis stage, there is a focus on learning and changingthe organization. We do not think that there are evident lines of demarcations or watertightshutters between the three stages (without overlaps and recurrence), or that the sub-areaslisted up in Figure 1 can be distributed as easily as it appears. But the three stages allow usto integrate and to make a preliminary overview, which can be revised and refined later on.

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PRECRISISSTAGE

CRISIS EVENT

POSTCRISISSTAGE

Focal point

To preventTo prepare

To handle the crisis

To make sense

To learnTo change

(1) Employees asreceivers

Communication ofrisks, issues and stakes

Management orcrisis managementteam as senders

Communication thatstrengthens thepsychological crisispreparedness

Communication ofrelevant instructionsand information

Communication ofnew knowledge(organizationallearning andmemory)

Other types ofsenders outside theorganization

Communication of thecrisis managementplan (policies andguidelines)

Handling of reactionsto the crisis and sensemakingProtection/restorationof the trust andconfidence amongemployeesCrisis autocommunication

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As it also appears from Figure 1, we distinguish between a series of communicative

situations on the vertical axis: (1) the employees as receivers (and the management or thecrisis management team of the organization as senders) and (2) the employees as senders(and the management or the crisis management team of the organization as receivers).This distinction is necessary in order to demonstrate how employees as internalstakeholders may be mobilized before, during, and after a crisis situation. To highlightthe complexity or porosity of organizations, that is: the fact that it is impossible to make aclear-cut distinction between what is internal and what is external (Cheney andChristensen, 2001), we also distinguish between (3) other types of senders outside theorganization and (4) other types of receivers outside the organization. The media are aninstance of the former by virtue of their ability to create verbal and visual pictures of theorganization in crisis, pictures that may have an impact on how employees behave andcommunicate about their workplace. Employees do also watch television, listen to theradio, read newspaper articles or blogs on the internet. Informal networks (such asfamily, friends, and colleagues) and their use of social media are an instance of the latter.Employees often communicate within these networks, not only when a crisis breaks out,but also before and after. Thus, by internal crisis communication, we do not onlyunderstand communication that remains inside the organizational container (the formalor material boundaries of the organization). All types of organizations, at all hierarchicallevels, from the bottom to the top, are porous letting internal communication leak out,and external communication leak in due to different stakeholder roles, communicativepractices, and social networks crossing organizational boundaries.On both the horizontal and vertical axis, we operate with a category that we callorganizational factors having a positive or negative influence on internal crisiscommunication before, during and/or after a crisis. These factors develop more or lessdynamically according to the type of organization, crisis type, and crisis history.Among the most important factors, we find the organizational crisis culture whichform part of the formal or informal organizational culture in general (Johansen andFrandsen, 2007, p. 344). The organizational crisis culture tells us something about how,when, where, and why an organization sees and remembers crises; how theorganization makes sense of the crises it has experienced; how the organization lookson and accept mistakes and errors; and how the psychological crisis-preparednesslooks like (including the psychological defense mechanisms thriving in theorganization, Mitroff and Anagnos, 2001, pp. 45-8).It is now possible to structure or systematize the various sub-areas within the field ofinternal crisis communication applying the new integrative framework based on ourdefinition of the relationship between an organization and its internal stakeholders(the employees and our application of the three-stage approach as a heuristic method. Asalready suggested, we view internal crisis communication as something broader, morecomplex and dynamic, than it is traditionally the case. Internal crisis communication is notonly when the managers of an organization (the sender) communicates to or with theemployees of the organization (the receiver), as it is usually represented in thepractical-oriented literature. Internal crisis communication also comprises situationswhere the employees communicate inside the organization, among each other or to themanagement, or across organizational boundaries (playing the role of both senders andreceivers). Internal crisis communication even comprises situations where the employeesinterpret and make sense of the organizations external crisis communication

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(crisis auto-communication), that is: how the employees understand the crisis responsestrategies used by the organizations (crisis) managers or public relations officers onthe corporate web site, in press releases, during press conferences, in statements tothe media, or in interviews with journalists.A new research agendaThe question now is: where do we begin? How can we best expand the existing body ofknowledge about internal crisis communication? As we see it, the following empiricaland conceptual research projects will be the most urgent:(1) Quantitative surveys in private and public organizations (within specificorganizational fields), the purpose of which is to describe how theseorganizations work with their internal crisis communication (if at all) before,during, and after a crisis. In their large-scale survey in Denmark covering morethan 750 organizations, Frandsen and Johansen (2004) asked the question:Which communication channels have been used or will be used for internalcrisis communication in your company or authority? In a more recent surveyconducted among 367 private and public organizations in Denmark in 2011(Johansen et al., 2011), a series of more specific questions were brought up, suchas: how is internal crisis communication integrated in the crisis managementplan of the organization? How is the internal crisis communication organizedbefore, during, and after a crisis? Do organizations have internal spokespersonsand policies and guidelines for what to communicate internally and externallyon behalf of the employees? Are employees actively involved as ambassadors?Do they take communicative initiatives themselves?(2) Case studies of how, when, where, and why employees see, or do not see,various types of organizational crises, and how their crisis perception is affected byindividual and/or organizational factors such as the organizational function (workculture), educational background (professional culture), age, gender, and seniority.(3) Case studies of how, when, where, and why employees remember, or do notremember, various types of organizational crises, and how their crisismemory is affected by individual and/or organizational factors such as theorganizational function (work culture), educational background (professionalculture), age, gender, and seniority.(4) Experimental studies of how employees make sense of and react to theexternal crisis response strategies applied by their own organization. Do theyinterpret these response strategies in the same way as the external stakeholders,or do their stakes and relationship with the organization make them interpretthe crisis response strategies in other ways? To what extent can we applyalready existing theories and models, such as image restoration theory (Benoit,1995), crisis communication as terminological control (Hearit, 2006), situationalcrisis communication theory (Coombs, 2007b), contingency approach to crisiscommunication (Pang et al., 2010), and crisis sensemaking theory (cf. theliterature review), to internal crisis communication?(5) Experimental studies of how employees interpret, make sense of, and react tothe negative media coverage of crises. How, when, where, and why does thisaffect their organizational identity and identification?

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Concluding remarks: implications for future research

The study of internal crisis communication will hopefully generate new insights thatwill improve our understanding of how private and public organizations and theirinternal stakeholders communicate before, during, and after a crisis. These insightswill challenge previous crisis communication research in at least three ways.First, there is a clear need for stakeholder differentiation. Different stakeholdershave different stakes and expectations. Previous crisis communication research hasprimarily treated stakeholders as a monolithic entity without taking into considerationhow a difference in stakes may have an impact on how external and especially internalstakeholders interpret, communicate and react to organizational crises.Second, and in close relation to the foregoing, we need to apply an integrated approachcombining the different perspectives of what we traditionally term external andinternal communication. Organizations are porous or permeable constructions, lettingformal and informal messages go in and out. Citizens show interest and intervene in theinternal affairs of companies from which they buy their products and services. Politiciansuse an organizational crisis for the opportunity to promote their own political agendas.Employees follow closely how journalists and social network users react to the externalcrisis communication of their own organization. All these stakeholders contribute to therhetorical arena that opens up in most crisis situations, and in which many corporate andnon-corporate voices meet, compete, collaborate or negotiate (Johansen and Frandsen,2007; Frandsen and Johansen, 2010b). By integration, we do not necessarily mean that theorganization in crisis must speak with one voice. There are different types and degrees ofintegration, at different organizational levels. Sometimes, a strong integration is the bestsolution; at other times, a more flexible integration is the best solution.Finally, there is a need for an interactive communication model taking intoconsideration the complexity and dynamics of organizational crises, and defining bothmanagers and employees as active sensemakers and sensegivers.Note1. The concept of internal stakeholder has been added to stakeholder management theory at a laterdate than most of the other stakeholder groups. Freeman (1984) gives an account of how he tobegin with rejected the concept and found it troublesome. The reason for this rejection is to befound in the context of the emergence of stakeholder management. In Strategic Management:A Stakeholder Approach, Freeman (1984, p. 216) states: The point of a stakeholder approach toorganizations is to force organizational managers to be more responsive to the externalenvironment. [. . .] By applying the stakeholder approach internally within the corporation,there is a danger that the force of the argument is lost. This is the reason why Freeman reducesthe internal stakeholders to the conduit through which managers can reach other externalstakeholders (Freeman, 1984, p. 218; Welch and Jackson, 2007).ReferencesAggerholm, H.K. (2009), Afskedigelser og organisationskommunikation: En undersgelse aforganisationskommunikationens betydning for tilbagevrende medarbejderesmeningsskabelse og forstaelse af den organisatoriske virkelighed i en danskafskedigelseskontekst, PhD theses, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus.Alpaslan, C.M., Green, S.E. and Mitroff, I.I. (2009), Corporate governance in the context of crises:towards a stakeholder theory of crisis management, Journal of Contingencies and CrisisManagement, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 38-49.

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